Beyond Regeneration

by Jenny Schwartz

  “And even if he does want me.” She flinched at the shock of the creek’s cold water. She waded in so that she could feel the light pull of the stream against her ankles. “He doesn’t have any claim on me. I don’t owe him anything.” To be tied to another being terrified her. She was still surfacing from her deep reluctance to engage with life.

  Jack might have been right—drat him—to point out her sense of responsibility towards the QNA. But at least the QNA wasn’t human.

  For two years she’d flinched equally from needing anyone or being needed by anyone—hence the physical distance from her family in Perth. Being needed, loving, made you vulnerable.

  “I can’t do it.” Not again. Not ever. She tilted her head back and stared up through the overhanging branches to the stars. Had every human in history looked up at the stars and wondered how they could stare so serenely at people’s heartbreak?

  “I like Jack. I respect him.” But did he make her heart beat faster? Would there be a gap in her life without him, and why would she be willing to risk that gap?

  “Liking and respect are a good place to start.”

  She jumped. She hadn’t heard Jack’s approach. Her feet slipped on the smooth mud of the creek bed.

  He lunged forward to grab her arm and steady her.

  The warm touch of his hand after the cool night air jolted her as much as his unexpected return. Suddenly she was desperate to have proof that the QNA and her own thoughts were wrong. “Jack, why aren’t you married?”

  His eyes narrowed.

  He didn’t release his hold on her arm, and standing so close, she could see the watchful, wary way he studied her expression.

  “You’ve guessed?” he asked.

  “That you love me?” The words were hard to say. It was such a large claim.

  “For years.” He released her arm, but when she didn’t step back, he ran his palm lightly along it. “The QNA?”

  He was asking who’d given away his secret. Charley thought of Nicola, but Jack wouldn’t want to know that he wore his heart on his sleeve, on top of the QNA’s meddling. “The QNA didn’t use your memories,” she said. “It used mine. I only realized now that you envied what Eric and I had.”

  “More than that.” He crossed his arms, locking himself away from her. “I envied Eric you. Not just love, companionship, passion, loyalty. I envied him you. I still do.”

  The blunt words deprived her of any answer. How could she match Jack’s emotional courage? She saw his tension in the way he held his body, and her heart hurt because he was so much braver than her. Coward that she was, she shifted her ground. “I think the QNA does more than communicate via memories. I think it magnifies emotions.” She wet her dry lips. “In the lab, I was overwhelmed by a wave of wanting.”

  He clenched his fists, but his tone remained steady. “That emotion might not have been magnified.”

  She closed her eyes against the rush of feeling he evoked. To be wanted so much was seductive, and frightening. It promised so much. “I don’t want to hurt you.” And even more honestly. “I’m scared of being hurt.”

  “Nothing and no one can stop life hurting us.” His crossed arms fell.

  “That’s not much of a reassurance.”

  “I won’t lie to you.” His step back had taken him into the shadows.

  She couldn’t see his expression as he continued.

  “I wanted to keep you safe, put you on that plane to Sydney, shut you out of my life if necessary. Since Lillian’s death, this place has spiraled further and further into danger. I can’t see the way out. I hadn’t thought through how much people will want to control sensory bio-enhancement. Now, this issue of QNA sentience.” He took his glasses off and rubbed a hand over his face. “You won’t leave, will you?”

  “No.” She stepped with due care out of the creek. If she fell, he’d touch her. She stuffed her socks into her shoes with the concentration of an apiarist handling her charges. For tonight, she couldn’t deal with anything more. With total determination she changed the conversation to irrelevancies. “There better not be prickles in the path back.”

  “I have a feeling they won’t deter you.” Jack stepped out of the shadows to walk beside her back to the house.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The QNA lab’s sage green walls were lit by the morning sun and the Pachelbel Canon played softly from the speakers. Whoever was looking after the lab, filling the gap of Alan’s departure, was maintaining his high standards. All was peaceful and unobtrusively productive.

  When she wasn’t immediately assaulted by the QNA’s emotional-avalanche style of communication, Charley remembered how to breathe. Her breath rushed out before whooping back in. The sound was inelegant. “It’s okay,” she said to Jack, who’d accompanied her on the early morning visit. “Everything’s—” She yelped.

  Jack caught her in mid dash for the lab door.

  She struggled desperately. “It spoke to me!”

  His fingers dug into her upper arms. “I thought that was the whole idea of this—”

  “In words,” she interrupted. “The QNA used words. Language.”

  He looked over her shoulder at the QNA culture dishes. “What did it say?”

  “Um. Hello.” She gave a lame smile. Hello wasn’t exactly a terrifying communication.

  Then her eyes widened and she clutched at the front of Jack’s shirt. “It just said that it thought I’d be happy with its new talent. Oh man.” She closed her eyes, the better to concentrate on the QNA’s silent words.

  Communicating via memories had been violently disturbing, recreating as they did the recalled emotion throughout the body; but in some ways the QNA’s advance to verbal communication was worse. An alien voice inside her head was surely the oldest, strongest sign of insanity.

  “You can’t be talking,” she thought at the QNA.

  “I am. Or, to be precise, I am using words to communicate since I noticed words are your preferred means of communication, even to yourself. Alan thought in pictures.”

  “Visually.” That she verbalized even her idle thoughts didn’t surprise her. Perhaps it was journalistic training, but unless a thought was locked into words, for her it lacked a certain reality. But if she wasn’t delusional, then the QNA’s new crisper form of communication had been learned, mastered, in a frighteningly short period of time.

  “Language,” the QNA continued. “Is far more useful than visual images. It’s sharper, and yet, at the same time, it allows one to hide more.”

  “Welcome to the homo sapiens’ world,” she said aloud, ruefully amused. The QNA’s observation reminded her oddly of an old theory she’d once read about Neanderthals and their extinction. Where humans had communicated in words, with language’s precision and duplicity, Neanderthals had relied on telepathy. Perhaps their telepathy had been akin to the QNA’s use of visual memories, a clumsy tool that limited the evolution of conceptual thinking.

  Perhaps, too, where the QNA’s word skills or grammar fell away, her brain was filling in the gaps.

  “Charley.” Jack shook her and her eyes popped open. “Are you in a trance?”

  “If I was, shaking me wasn’t very bright.”

  “Oh, hell.” He wrapped her in a tight hug.

  It felt good after the alieness of the QNA’s intelligence touching her mind. She closed her mind to the QNA’s silent, “Jack’s worried about you.” She knew that. What the QNA couldn’t know was the physical reassurance of human touch. She let herself enjoy the feeling of warmth and the pleasure of leaning into another’s strength. She sighed and wriggled comfortably.

  He muttered something and tilted her face up. His kiss was desperate, hungry, tender and shiver-inducing. It completely eclipsed the QNA’s interested running monologue in her mind. Charley opened her mouth and pressed against him. His tongue invaded and she whimpered. She felt hot, her skin unbearably sensitive; constrained by her clothes. Jack helped there. He pushed her shirt and bra out of the way and shape
d her breast.

  “Charley.” His breathing was ragged.

  “Yes.”

  But Jack wasn’t asking a question, he was begging for mercy. “We can’t make love here.” His fingers stroked her breast, drawing gently on the nipple, while he watched her face.

  She made an incoherent sound. She thought they were doing a good job of doing making love, if he’d only stop talking.

  He kissed her hard and fast, and stepped back. “You’d never forgive me if we made love now. Here.”

  She wobbled, but managed to stand on shaky legs. “Right.” Maybe. Her face heated. What had happened to her decision to avoid involvement? She looked at Jack and felt a different kind of heat to that of embarrassment lick through her.

  “Jack arouses you.” The QNA made itself known.

  “Everyone’s an expert,” she muttered. What would the near bodiless QNA know?

  “Charley?”

  “Nothing. I’d forgotten our audience.”

  He cast a horrified look at the QNA culture dishes. “It sensed, it, um, when we…”

  “Oh yeah,” she said wryly. “I think we’re finished here.”

  She had no arguments from Jack, who wrenched open the door, shutting it emphatically behind them. They walked in silence to his office. Stalked, might have been a better description of his progress.

  Once behind his desk, Jack recovered the use of his voice—after clearing his throat twice. “So, the QNA are using language?”

  Charley nodded. A neutral subject suited her fine, too. The implications of that incendiary moment in the lab could be considered later; much later, when she wasn’t sitting only a wide smooth desk away from the source of the trouble and with people in the reception area. It was her turn to clear her throat. She looked around the office. “Are we being recorded?”

  He relaxed into a smile. “No.” He tapped a small box on his desk. “I don’t understand the technology, but Michael’s messenger promised it would fuzz any recording or transmission.”

  “Michael?” She couldn’t work out his relationship to Jack. From the first, Jack had shown suspicion towards Michael, warning him away from her. Yet the two men had been, and in a sense, still were, partners. Even Michael’s theft of the sensory bio-enhancement technology and Alan’s expertise, hadn’t irrevocably broken the bond between them.

  “How evolved is the QNA’s use of language?” Jack asked.

  “Well, I heard them clearly.” She attempted to find the words to describe her experience. “I mean, I didn’t hear a voice as such, but words—not images—were clear in my mind.”

  “Damn.” He glared at her.

  She blinked at the ferocity.

  He tapped the claws of his left hand on the desk. “So, you’re saying the QNA can communicate clearly and precisely? Can they interpret the information they read from us?”

  Oh. He was worried about the QNA being a voyeur. She blushed. “Yes.”

  But he’d apparently moved beyond embarrassment. In fact, he’d put aside personal matters. “They’re dangerous.”

  “Pardon?” She was still fighting for mental balance. From an appalled denial of any relationship with Jack she’d moved to damn near ripping his clothes off. Hormones? Or had the walls between her and life come crashing down finally and irrevocably?

  She stared at Jack across the desk. When had his mouth become so sexy? Had his bottom lip always been full and hinting of passion?

  “Think about it, Charley. What is the one thing groups like the CIA have been wanting to do, trying to do, for decades? Read minds. Nicola has already seen the possibility, that’s why she asked if the QNA could show you other people’s memories. I bet Michael didn’t miss the concept either.”

  Nor had Charley. She pushed aside her personal feelings. The QNA had invaded the last refuge of privacy: the human mind. And now it could communicate what it found in precise words. The idea that the QNA could—would—be used as a covert weapon of war outraged every liberal instinct and sent chills down her spine. “What price freedom?”

  Jack caught the words. “I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re going to do, especially if QNA are developing sentience in other labs around the world.”

  Other labs in which differing outlooks and agendas of the lab staff might form a very different personality in the QNA. What if the QNA were malicious? It opened the door to a nightmare scenario.

  “John.” A nurse knocked and opened his office door in one movement. “You have an appointment with Steve Farrell in two minutes in the surgery.”

  “Okay, Patricia.”

  The nurse withdrew, still looking harassed.

  Frowning at the door, Jack said absently. “I have to advertise for someone to fill Lillian’s position.”

  “Go meet this Steve Farrell,” Charley said. Ordinary life had its own demands, though the sky was falling.

  “Steve’s an ex-client back for a final checkup.” Jack flicked his thumb and index finger cat claws together with a nervous clicking rhythm. “About the QNA—”

  “Forget them, for now. We can talk later.”

  “Then we need to talk about us.” He shrugged on his jacket as he left the room.

  Charley sighed, leaning back in the chair. What did he expect of her after that kiss in the lab? What did she want?

  A kiss? It had been so much more. Her hunger had come from nowhere and met an answering need in Jack. The illusion of friendship alone had exploded. What was between them was infinitely more dangerous—and more promising?

  “Only if I find some courage.”

  Getting up, she entered the reception area and offered the nurse a sympathetic smile. “Are you very busy?”

  “Juggling two jobs, I’m running around like a madwoman.” Patricia’s behavior supported the claim as she ruffled through stacks of paper and a multitude of message slips. She snagged a sheet of pink paper from the middle of a stack with a cry of triumph. “It would help if John stopped visitors. That Dr. Solomon had a ton of questions. Didn’t want to make an appointment to see John, yet wouldn’t go away while I tried to check in Steve Farrell.”

  Solomon was here? “Has he gone?”

  “Who?” Patricia looked up, blinking in surprise that someone was listening to her rant.

  “Dr. Solomon.”

  “Him? He went to the QNA lab.” Patricia pre-empted criticism. “It got him out of my hair and I checked his identification first. He has his own regeneration clinic in America—I’ve heard of him. When he said he’d look around the lab until John was free to talk to him, what could I do?”

  Say no, Charley thought. But that wasn’t fair. In ordinary times, a professional colleague would be welcome at New Hope. Only, with Jack’s words ringing in her ears, and her own doubts about Solomon’s affiliations—by his own admission, he had friends in the CIA, the archetypal devious, power-mad villains in white hats—Charley didn’t think Solomon should be alone in the lab.

  “I know Dr. Solomon a bit,” she said. “I think I’ll see if I can catch up with him.”

  Patricia shrugged and bent her head again over the file notes. Whatever anyone wanted to do, as long as it didn’t mean more work for her, had Patricia’s endorsement.

  Charley rubbed the stump of her arm as she walked away. It itched. She wanted to tell Jack that Solomon was here, but the business of New Hope had to go on, and Alan’s absence only made Jack’s workload heavier.

  It’s up to me, she told herself, and didn’t realize until later that her acceptance of responsibility was complete—not just for the QNA, but for Jack and the future of bio-enhancement.

  She’d returned to life, to complete re-engagement with caring and committing herself.

  The QNA lab door stood open.

  As soon as she stepped inside, the QNA, too perturbed to form language, thrust a memory at her.

  Lillian, newly dead, lying on the rocks with sightless eyes staring up at a cloud covered sky. Charley heard the beat of waves and the roar of the
breaking spray. Closer, she heard the uneven faster breathing of panic and the heavy thud of a heartbeat in a body not accustomed to action.

  “Charlotte?”

  The QNA didn’t want to release the vision.

  Hands touched Charley’s shoulders and she recoiled violently. The vision vanished. Charley’s gaze focused and she saw Solomon’s face just above hers. Her gasp was as harsh as a scream. “You killed Lillian.”

  His hands fell to his sides. “It was an accident.”

  She shuddered. Thanks to the QNA, she had the memory of his violence in her. She shook her head.

  “It was an accident,” he repeated, vehemently. He cast an harassed look around the lab. “We can’t talk here.”

  “Talk?”

  “Yes, talk. Somewhere where we won’t be overheard.”

  “We have nothing to talk about. You—”

  “Not here,” Solomon interrupted violently. “Outside.”

  She tried to assess the situation and her options. Curiosity won out. “Not on the beach.”

  He closed his eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reasoning.

  “The garden,” she said. It was awkward being at the mercy of her journalistic instincts, but there was no way, once the initial panic ebbed, that she could refuse an interview. Why had Solomon killed Lillian, and why had he returned?

  They left the building through the side door and chose a bench isolated from the others in the garden. It was halfway to Alan’s house, tucked into the curve of three diosma bushes clipped into shape and starred with white flowers. Charley turned her shoulder to Alan’s empty house and its silent, isolated reminder of heartbreak.

  Solomon sat down heavily on the bench. “I don’t know how you guessed.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, frowning at the ground. “I told you that I had a friend in the CIA. It’s more than that. I’ve been detailed to the CIA numerous times in my career. I was called back this time as a consultant to comment on Bradshaw’s work.”